Teams Phone Mobile - what's coming in 2024 with Vandana Thomas

Tom Arbuthnot: 0:00

Hi, welcome back to the Teams Insider podcast. In this show, I talk to Vandana Thomas about what's gone on with Teams Phone Mobile in 2023 and what we can expect in 2024. Thanks everybody for the support this year and many thanks to Luware, the supporter for this podcast. And if you're watching this at time of release, I hope you have a happy holidays. On with the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Excited for this one. Whenever we have Vandana on and we get into teams on mobile, we always get loads of views and loads of interest because it's clearly a hot topic. So Vandana, welcome to the show. For those that don't know, you could just give us a brief intro of your role.

Vandana Thomas: 0:35

Yes. Hey so I'm Vandana Thomas. I am in our calling and operator integrations team. I'm a group product manager there and my role is to make sure That we have a very strong mobility strategy for Teams Phone. So I work with me and my team. We work with operators across the world to bring a mobility strategy that works both for the operators and us.

Tom Arbuthnot: 1:06

Awesome. I think you work in one of the most interesting and potentially disruptive areas of teams in that bringing, bringing mobile and UCAS together, which obviously we've had FMC for years, but this is a new. Approach to this. This is like properly tied into the platform, not just forking or, SIM ringing. So it's really exciting. Can we talk about, it's been in market for a year now. Can we talk about where we are in terms of operators and coverage?

Vandana Thomas: 1:32

Yes, I'm really excited. We. We now are in nine countries nine different countries. We still have just six operators. We've we've been able to leverage some of our operator partnerships to launch in multiple geos which was very nice. So our latest has been Telia in Norway and, with Swisscom, we just launched Liechtenstein. I can never pronounce that.

Tom Arbuthnot: 2:00

I feel like only locals can pronounce that properly. But

Vandana Thomas: 2:02

yeah, let me go over the ones that we are launched in. So we are right now of course we launched with Rogers in Canada and Telia in Sweden first. A year ago then Verizon in the US DT Deutsche Telecom in Germany, T-Mobile, Germany. Then we came with Swisscom in Switzerland. Then British Telecom in the UK. Yeah, we finally

Tom Arbuthnot: 2:26

got. BT in the UK. I was waiting on that one.

Vandana Thomas: 2:29

Yes, you've been waiting. And you are on Team Phone Mobile now, are

Tom Arbuthnot: 2:33

you? Yeah. I got some SIMs from BT, kindly. At least

Vandana Thomas: 2:37

you're not begging me for SIMs to go

Tom Arbuthnot: 2:39

out. No. I'll give a lot of credit to both BT and Deutsche Telekom. Both of them turned up SIMs for me to test, which was

Vandana Thomas: 2:44

kind of them. Yeah. So then we have Telia, Denmark Telia, Norway and then we've signed a whole bunch of contracts for next year. We will see at least another 10 markets come alive next, next year. We've also recognized this thing that oftentimes customers want choice within. Within the same country, so let's say you have the U. S. Verizon. But if you go to any large enterprise, they have mobile contracts with all three large operators here, which is T Mobile, AT& T and Verizon, so, it's similar everywhere, right? We will be coming in UK with another two, two more operators very soon.

Tom Arbuthnot: 3:35

Yeah, and I think like obviously for the operators, it's great to have. Period of exclusivity starts to, give them some jump start on their investment from a customer's perspective. If I'm going down the Teams Phone Mobile route, even if I love the operator that's got it, it's nice to know that in 12 months when I contractually renew, I've got an option because otherwise I get addicted to the product and I'm like I'm potentially stuck on that operator. So yeah, I think inevitably having choices is going to be great.

Vandana Thomas: 4:03

Yes. Yes, indeed. But yeah, we are very excited. What I love is Almost maybe a year or two ago, we had to work with operators a lot, trying to get the business case understood by operators, but as more and more operators are rolling out 5G, and as I think we're going to have something like 1 billion smartphones on 5G, By the end of 2023, which is almost here, that's what I saw in the Erickson mobility report, which is huge, right? Which, if you look at it, that's just 5G, but if you look at the entire set of mobility, smartphones out there. There are close to 6 billion smartphones out there, which are

Tom Arbuthnot: 4:53

dwarfs computers. It dwarfs laptops. It dwarfs like M365 users that's the primary device for a lot of people often. Yes.

Vandana Thomas: 5:02

It's now very clear to the operators that. To differentiate their offers, they do need to work with the hyperscalers, the collaboration services providers like us. And there are so many future use cases, AI think about that, like how much investment everybody has to do to come to. par with what we've already accomplished. It's now I think a slam dunk deal. It's, we were at this point of time that operators and customers must understand. That a mobile calling experience or a mobile experience that you thought was stable stakes today is just a wise, immersive experience. But as you go into the future, you want much more productivity coming for your road warriors and for the other mobile workers.

Tom Arbuthnot: 6:01

Let's talk about AI because obviously co pilot and AI is Like the thing of 2023 and definitely the thing inside Microsoft, like we've got Copilot now on Teams phone and across channels and chat and everything else as well. I think Copilot on Teams mobile is really interesting and what I want to see in an ideal world and you can tell me if this is now or futures is I want Copilot always on my mobile because I want to be. On the road in the car and safe in the knowledge that it's all being transcribed. I can go and check out the transcript and kind of ask Copilot what the key points were afterwards. I don't think we're quite there yet with it always on because there's that kind of privacy counter. But where are we with that?

Vandana Thomas: 6:44

Yes, it's very exciting. And at Ignite, we announced Teams Phone with a Copilot cap capabilities. Yeah, the wonderful thing is everything that comes to Teams Phone also comes to Teams Phone Mobile, right? And the only additional end point that we have to be very conscious and mindful of is the mobile native dialer end point. Like it doesn't work right now with the native dialer endpoint, but the user has the ability to uplift to a Teams call and then it would be available in a Teams call. That's the current experience. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: 7:18

Which kind of makes sense because they have to, even on Teams Phone, on a fixed line or SIP, you have to invoke Copilot right now. It's not auto on. I guess if you had third party, like a. Compliance tooling type recording that will be a different conversation because they'd be compliance recording the call from an AI perspective. But with Copilot, it's a the pitch is your personal system, right? So you have to invoke it.

Vandana Thomas: 7:41

Yeah, no, indeed. So what, at least you touched upon a very important thing there, right? Like, when you're talking AI, it's a multi faceted conundrum that you, everybody faces on how much to listen, get all this information and data to help you get more productive and better at your job versus how much do you not want to share, where do you draw the line, right? To me, it is very simple. It's it's, it should be a choice for someone, right? Like that you have to opt in for that. Maybe even on a per call basis you need to be able to turn it on and off right now. Of course there are, there will be company situations that demand that it's. on all the time, in which case you have to be very conscious as a user of the product.

Tom Arbuthnot: 8:41

That yeah like we do in FinServ today with recording, they know their calls are recorded. Everything's recorded. That's part of the gig.

Vandana Thomas: 8:48

But for everybody else, and this is something I think I've been passionate about from the beginning, when from the first line that was written on this was, it would be user behavior centric. It would be a choice for you how you do it. Whether you want the call on your native dialer, whether you want the call in Teams, whether you want a combination. These are all personal choices. Oftentimes, assuming, of course the company allows it. Yeah. But it is a company provided number and. Let's look at some of the Copilot use cases for Teams Phone Mobile, right? For me, I think it's a big hero use case. A mobile worker is like one of the hero personas for, A Copilot like calling situation. Yeah, because the mobile workers always on the road. Let's say I'm a technician. I'm on the road and I'm getting to go to someone's to my appointment next appointment. And I find that a part hasn't arrived or the user the client needs a rescheduling. Or a certain work order needs to be, put in the systems. And the, sometimes the client's giving me a lot of instructions that I'm not able to process.

Tom Arbuthnot: 10:09

Yeah you're getting like particularly field workers, you're getting a ton of detail from the end. Customer, whoever that may be, usually over the phone and usually like they're rattling through it and you're doing what 5678 maybe more than that jobs a day, like having an having a an AI or a Copilot that has your back on here's the key points that were just pirated at you in 60 seconds like, yeah, that'd be amazing.

Vandana Thomas: 10:33

Yeah, how many times have you had this wish? I hope I had an assistant in this car taking notes and putting them into the systems. But think of the world where I've had that discussion and I'm saying, Hey, hold on. Let me turn Copilot on so that I can have my assistant take notes and the assistant. So you've turned it on will. The assistant takes notes. And if there are notes in there that says a purchase order needs to be created, it connects me to my Service now tool. Not that Service Now I was the only tool, but I like it. Yeah. Yeah. And then you, it populates all the information that You've taken in the link comes back both to the customer, the client, and you confirm that this is indeed the agreement submitted, sign the docu sign, be done with it. Think about that. Like you did it all while driving, the other example is, scheduling conflicts. Okay. Like. All right, this is not working today. I have today there is something happening. I can't, you can't, I can't have you come over. And then, I then as a technician gets this opportunity to say, okay, let's reschedule. I don't have visibility into my calendar.

Tom Arbuthnot: 11:55

No, the AI gets it. He knows who the caller is. It says, okay, reschedule. I'll send you an SMS or an email as a customer. The technician's out now because it's not even their job anymore. It's just going back to the scheduling system, but they don't have to then talk back to head office to be like, Oh, you need to. reschedule this thing. Yeah.

Vandana Thomas: 12:13

Indeed. So there it's just the tip of the iceberg. I think there's so much to be unpacked here. And I love that the operators are leaning on us to solve some of these, and I love that we chose the path of integrating deeply with them so that a lot of information can be exchanged securely without, breaking customer trust and, the security and that's, that to me is great and customer choice.

Tom Arbuthnot: 12:47

Makes sense. Copilot's very new. Let's put it back to today. It's in market. What do you, who are the use cases you're seeing this with? Is it for everybody? Is it mainly frontline? Is it knowledge worker? What are you seeing work well today?

Vandana Thomas: 13:02

Yeah it's been an interesting mix. I, I was telling somebody the other day, there isn't a bad fit for this. If you have a corporate provided. Number today there isn't a bad fit for Teams Phone Mobile, but at the same time, if it's someone like me, even like I'm I'm a knowledge worker. I have most of my calls, uh, scheduled. I hardly have unscheduled calls, right? And I must get like maybe one PSTN call a day, not more than that. And sometimes it's a telemarketer it's so I'm not the prime use case. I'm not the hero persona, but what I love For my knowledge work, a hybrid working thing is I keep going back and forth to work. So for me being able to have any of my mobile calls all come in one place. Yeah. Is helpful. I'm sitting with my headphones most of the time. Everything is. On my laptop, it helps me that I'm not having to touch this brick again.

Tom Arbuthnot: 14:06

Your call history is there, your voicemail is there. So just for the convenience sake of that. Yeah, but

Vandana Thomas: 14:11

I'm not really the hero person. I'm like the nice to have. So maybe my company might not really say, Hey, should I pay 4 or 5 more than what I'm already paying for? Yeah, and

Tom Arbuthnot: 14:23

that's an interesting consideration, right? At the moment, the operators are all charging. Dollars uplift on their plan depends on who the operator is depends on what your deal is, but right now your accounting team has to justify I could get fixed line for x or TPM for y my suspicion is as more operators get into market that'll become more commoditized right now It's a premium feature, but we know how things go in mobile telco everything starts. We used to pay, 10 pence or X cents per dollar for an SMS and now that's, commodity. So on some timeline, I imagine that will get more and more. Yeah. So

Vandana Thomas: 15:00

going back to the question, who we see the most, the biggest fit, we have large. Beverage companies that are on the platform. We have automobile companies on the platform trucking companies on the platform. We have a lot of like grocery chains on the platform who are retail workers. It's. And FSI, of course,

Tom Arbuthnot: 15:23

is Yeah, FSI is the slam dunk because of the recording scenario, right? Yes. To

Vandana Thomas: 15:29

me I look at I look at this as people who have largely mobile workforce. It doesn't matter what type of company it has been. The mix has been all over the place, right? It's just that who sees most value for this is people who have, Mobile workers that are largely like the travel consultants, the sales consultants, the account managers, sales is a great organization. Financial consultants are a great organization, like just people like large consulting companies, there's a really large consulting company on this right now and they're willing to move it to as many areas. As many geographies that this would be available, but their consultants are traveling all the time. So they need, they have mobile numbers and mobile devices bought for them. Yeah. Then a delivery drivers and, like for bottling companies, et cetera, that has, has been a good use case. Banks are not just financial, like financial, yes, but wealth management companies, banks. And the other is like very state and local departments. They're like, they're very interested in this and this especially is very curious in Canada and in in the US. There's a lot of state and local bodies, organizations that want to do this.

Tom Arbuthnot: 16:54

Interesting. I guess it's worth calling out for those. Listening into this show is it's not you have to buy it for everybody. scenario you can mix and match on a per user basis between operator, connect the right routing, Microsoft calling plans and Teams Phone Mobile so as you said earlier, it might just be field sales. It might be the delivery drivers. You could have the rest of Teams be on, I don't know what you can call it in mobile, like fixed line and a subset on TPM.

Vandana Thomas: 17:17

Absolutely. And that's such an important point to call out, Tom, right? You have a portfolio of Teams Phone product types that your company can leverage. You don't have to have the same type for everybody in your organization. Yeah you, we have four main products, the calling plans, the Direct Routing, Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile. All four of these can be in your company and we are also looking for ways, as you might have heard, we have this whole private line and then we have the shared calling and also like multiple numbers that are, that's going to come soon. So we. We recognize that even though we talked about single mobile business provided numbers, mobile numbers, and we were always one Teams phone number, we recognize there are several geographies, several use cases where people need two numbers, at least, and I, the great thing is there is all types available to you. You want one on one, a fixed line and a mobile number per person. Great. We'll have a solution for that. You want to have a mobile number for 10 of you, but have one private line that is shared between the 10 of you, or not private line, but a shared number between you. We have all kinds. And one, if you need a private line that's just for specific use cases. That's cool, too. Yeah, so

Tom Arbuthnot: 18:46

we're inheriting some of those Teams phone routing capabilities, number of presentation capabilities because it's routing through Teams. We're getting those benefits on the mobile native dialer

Vandana Thomas: 18:58

endpoint. Automatically. And I think I've talked to you about this previously, right? If you think about how much innovation there has been in voice calling over the last, I don't know, two, three, four decades. Multi was the best thing that IMS was the best thing that happened. But after that, what, right? But if you think about just tying, if you today have a mobile number, and if you just think about how much more just keeps coming to you just by whatever it might be, it's a 2 up. Charge. I don't know what you will negotiate between the operator and and Microsoft. It's a gift that keeps giving the value is just keeping on increasing. It's like you, you invest in it once. Start training your users to get used to your number now living in the cloud in a collaboration cloud and then realize every new benefit that comes. I'll give you an example, which is. So fantastic, which I learned recently. I'm not learned recently, but it dawned upon me recently, right? That we always tooted about the world TQOS. And the quality of service you get from being on a cellular call while you are in the, while you are out and about. And often times people came back and told us, but it is very noisy. I like the fact that when I'm on Teams. There's good noise cancellation, right? Now, think how much of that has been amped up with what we announced at Ignite recently with voice isolation. We're training you. We are training to isolate your voice. And that way it's such a good immersive experience. It's such a distraction free experience, Don't have to hear the dog barking in the back. Don't have to hear the children yelling. Don't have to hear the soccer cheers in

Tom Arbuthnot: 21:07

the background. Yeah. So again, we're going to inherit some of those platform benefits on the phone call. Yeah,

Vandana Thomas: 21:12

that's exciting. The other one that really excited me was like, the prioritized voicemail notification. If you're expecting a call and it goes to voicemail and it's now available as a secure prioritized notification that you can view and review it's, it's so much more than just using your regular voicemail.

Tom Arbuthnot: 21:36

Check my, I never check my mobile cellular voicemail. I don't know why, but it's just not part of my workflow. It's just it's not a thing.

Vandana Thomas: 21:42

It's so funny. I won't, I, I cannot tell you how many discussions, how many meetings and how many calls have I had to Have with every operator that comes on board, um, talking about voicemail and about customers talking about voicemail and I'm like, here's a benefit that you're getting the works with the voicemail on Teams, voicemail to email, the transcriptions, the security archiver lengths. Everything just, you don't even have to buy an extra socket for that. It's available. Yeah it's interesting. Yeah, we called it the protected voicemail. I think is the feature. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: 22:32

Cool. As we wrap up, because time flies, as always, is there anything into 2024 that you can share with us? There's a market expansion. What else are you thinking about as far as Teams Phone Mobile goes?

Vandana Thomas: 22:42

Of course, the geo expansion is a big one. We definitely will go to hopefully double the markets that we support right now. Next year, fingers crossed. That's exciting. Yeah, messaging. Has been one that has been very interesting that everybody says that, Hey, we would adopt the product if he also had messaging.

Tom Arbuthnot: 23:04

Some of the other UCAS platforms have that native SMS. It's interesting because Microsoft got it in ACS, it's the infrastructure pieces there. So that'll be interesting.

Vandana Thomas: 23:14

The one nuance I'd like to call out there is. We, as we tease this apart a lot, the more. Interesting use case. There was the archival of SMS,

Tom Arbuthnot: 23:26

right? So yeah, taking that into the same archival system as the rest of Microsoft.

Vandana Thomas: 23:31

Yeah. So the win here already with Teams Phone Mobile is if you have a Teams Phone number, mobile number, you can send and receive messages through your native. It cannot be archived right now until unless you have an archival. Arrangement with the operator. So we're thinking of prioritizing that aspect first, because that really will unblock a lot of the FSI use cases. The BYOD experience. Which, it's already there, you can bring your own device, your own personal device and put this as the second SIM or the first SIM or like your eSIM, it doesn't matter, it already is there, but we're definitely working with operators and OEMs to make this experience better.

Tom Arbuthnot: 24:14

And is that, that ultimately comes down to if the operator wants to offer that combination of SIM only, eSIM, physical SIM, is that right?

Vandana Thomas: 24:21

Yeah, that's right. Because oftentimes if you've seen all the BYOD products there that are in the market today, if I have a T Mobile device, uh, and I have a Verizon corporate number, then I have to work with T Mobile to unlock my device before I can put the Verizon number on it.

Tom Arbuthnot: 24:44

Yeah, it's a little bit different in Europe. We tend to be more or less unlocked by default now, but it's a lot Yeah, it's different in each country, isn't

Vandana Thomas: 24:49

it? Yeah. So in the U S and the, and some other parts, that's still a problem, but that's one, and then also having like dual radio and making sure that I'm on a personal call, but not missing my business call because my radios. Busy on my personal, but then your protected voicemail will help, but the, and then the some things that we are very excited about is like all these advanced mobility use cases, the enhanced AI experiences that I talked about those are things, all of these Ignite announcements, just making sure that they seamlessly work with the native dialer is one area of. Focus that we'll have, then the other one is like 5g and the quality of service promise and how the operators are working with us on making sure we, we bring that onto teams as well. So so that's another exciting one. Leveraging slicing and, QIS boosts and things like that would be. Would be things that

Tom Arbuthnot: 25:49

awesome exciting year. Then I'll be keeping a close eye on it, particularly the market coverage, because that's really interesting to see. So you know that comes along. But yeah, thanks for taking the time to share with us. Always good to get your view of the world as well. Appreciate it. And no doubt we'll have you back again, maybe mid next year and we'll see where we are with with coverage and AI, that would be

Vandana Thomas: 26:05

good. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. It's always a pleasure, Tom, talking to you. You get this product, you've tried this product and I. I love all the love you give this product. So thank you very much for that. And happy

Tom Arbuthnot: 26:21

holidays. Yeah. Thanks. Happy holidays.